The Oxbow (The Connecticut River near Northampton), by Thomas Cole, 1836.

The Oxbow (The Connecticut River near Northampton) (detail), by Thomas Cole, 1836. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of Mrs. Russell Sage, 1908.

Book of Nature

Volume 1, Number 3 | summer 2008

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Birds and Flowers of Spring and Summer, by Kano Eino, late seventeenth century.

Preamble

Messages in a Bottle

By Lewis H. Lapham

Nature is the only artist, the wonder of her collected works formed by their reflections in the mirrors of the human imagination.

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Plums and Apricots, by Emilie Preyer (1849-1930), date unknown.

The Art of Nature

By Frederick Turner

Human art, fiction, invention, and technology are not unnatural forces that have suddenly erupted into nature, but rather the natural continuation of nature’s own evolutionary processes.

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Map

Clearing the Inventory

Mining gold, chopping timber, tapping oil, fishing oceans.

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c. 1170 | Cîteaux

Mirror of Nature

Alain de Lille on the seasons of humankind.More

1859 | Downe

Paradigm Shift

Darwin marvels at the grandeur of natural selection.More

1590 | London

Nature’s Fruitful Progenies

Edmund Spenser on life “in everlasting store.”More

Charts & Graphs

Animal Instincts

Composite animals from mythical lore.

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Black and white photograph of Friedrich Nietzsche with a huge mustache.

Jules Verne

English poet and satirist Alexander Pope.

American poet, journalist, and essayist Walt Whitman.

Italian poet Dante Alighieri.

Portrait bust of presumed author of the Iliad and the Odyssey Homer.

Painted portrait of German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt.

Those things are better which are perfected by nature than those which are finished by art.

—Cicero, c. 45 BC

Engraving of William Shakespeare from the first folio edition.

Black and white photograph of Friedrich Nietzsche with a huge mustache.

William Shakespeare & Friedrich Nietzsche

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